Old School, New School, No School

In my time working with students, I have always found it interesting to note what to them constitutes writing.  They often equate writing with school writing exclusively, and, even at that, believe that only formal research papers rise to the level of real writing.  It often never occurs to them to consider the plethora of activity that goes on throughout a course or via texting and Facebook outside of school as, well, writing.  And yet it is. 

Collapsing those arbitrary perceptual boundaries can open up a broader understanding of writing for students.  Let me explain how.

Email did not exist when I attended college nor did it exist at Longview when I began working here.  I received no formal instruction in how to write an email and yet I spend hours each day producing them since emails are currently the salient communication tool of the workplace.  How did I learn to write in this new genre? In part, by applying what I had learned in graduate school about analyzing rhetorical situations. 

That is, I considered the audience to whom I was writing and what they needed to know and crafted the message from there.  Emails follow a pretty distinct pattern, so much so that the template was eventually built into the software.  The writer, of course, controls what gets plugged into that template, so reading emails was a good way to see which features were promoted and tolerated in an academic workplace.  Another important part of my learning was observing others and imitating their rhetorical moves.

Our students will similarly learn some of the writing nuances of their particular work setting while on the job.  At a four-year school, most will have opportunities to rehearse the kinds of professional writing they will be called to do post graduation.  For future health professionals, that means care plans and charting.  For would-be engineers, it means technical reports and proposals.  For those going into business, it means memos and reports that reflect brevity and clarity.  In that world, after all, time is money, so no one wants to waste it reading unnecessarily lengthy or arcane communiques.

Will email still be the communication tool of choice by the time current students graduate and enter the workforce?  Quite possibly.  Or email could be supplanted by a later, greater technological advance that sends it the way of the telegram.  What's important is not that we teach students to write emails or texts, but that we give them ample opportunity to learn through writing and, in doing so, help them develop enormous depth and breadth as communicators so they can accurately decipher any writing situation they find themselves in.

Our students are navigating different writing arenas throughout each day.  They slip between these much the way all of us do when we adjust our manner of speaking when with friends as opposed to a room full of strangers.  Linguists refer to this phenomenon as "shifting registers."

We typically dress and speak differently in the context of a job interview than we would in the context of talking to neighbors while doing yardwork. We recognize that these two situations make strikingly different demands of us as communicators.  Our ability to see these differences hinges on our understanding of the expectations of job interviews and our understanding of the expectations of informal chatting. The more you know about those expectations, the more likely you are to get your message across efficiently and effectively.

Helping students understand that academic writing requires a clarity and explicitness they are not necessarily obligated to when texting or posting on Facebook is a first step in helping them understand the expectations of the academic audience.
 
Art Young, a WAC pioneer who hailed from a disciplinary background of Engineering and English literature, distinguishes in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum between personal writing for learning which privileges the language and values of the writer and public writing for communicating which privileges the language and values of a broader discourse community (Prentice Hall Resources for Writing, third edition).

Dr. Art Young, Clemson Professor, holding his book Teaching and Learning Creatively, which is used by a number of WAC faculty at MCC-Longview and available for borrowing through the WAC Program.

Whether in school or out of school, whether for close associates or for publication, it all qualifies as writing. So the question becomes: How effective is any message?  Clearly, that depends a lot on who is reading it.  The sooner students grasp the concept of audience, the sooner they will become discerning writers. 

And since technologies associated with reading and writing are bound to change more than a few times in their lifetimes, our best bet is to prepare students to analyze every writing situation they encounter, including the ones we create.

So when and where did you learn to write an email?

Putting the Social in Social Media




Image by Salvatore Vuono


I recently read a set of student responses to an article on social media, part of a Computer Science assignment designed by instructor Cindy Herbert requiring students to read a relevant article, develop a thoughtful response using one of the instructor-posed questions as a guide, and then post an insightful response to another student's post.

I was struck that several students in their article responses registered shock at having witnessed instructors overtly tell classes NOT to write in textspeak: no "u" for "you," etc. They simply couldn't imagine their peers producing written coursework that would include such seemingly inappropriate language choices.

In WAC workshops in recent years, instructors have reported texting terms creeping into student papers and emails with increasing frequency and a few teachers have described entire papers rendered as a text message. 

Is technology impairing our ability to write?  Probably not, even though communication boundaries have clearly shifted.  Language, after all, is a socially constructed and continually negotiated aspect of culture.

People have long wanted to believe that computers have had a significant impact on writing skills, almost since the first pc came online, although there has been no evidence to support such a claim.


Scholars at the forefront of computer instruction in composition, like Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe, suggested early on that perhaps we were asking the wrong questions. After all, no one assumed that the typewriter had altered the process of composing written text. The pc did allow the production of perhaps more readable prose---literally-- in a technical sense, but it did not instigate more intelligent or well-written prose.


However, in landmark scholarship, both women studied what computer-mediated instruction did permit: notably, ease of revision as well as thoughtful selection and purposeful integration of rhetorically appropriate images.

That is not to say that technology might not be having some profound neurological effects.  The Blizzard of Oz last month afforded me the chance to view a Frontline program on PBS titled, Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, which explored some new territory in regard to the impact of technology on the brain. Despite the difficulties inherent in testing a phenomenon which changes unpredictably and incessantly, some discernible patterns have emerged as new questions continue to arise.

So far, all of it makes the landscape and future of higher ed at once fascinating and uncertain. This Frontline program (see trailer here) is well worth a view as it probes several distinct dimensions to show how recent technology advances have fundamentally reshaped some human endeavors.   

It features interviews with teachers and students from MIT and Stanford as well as from a middle school and high school who talk about the place of technology in their lives and debunk the myth of multi-tasking but tout the value of multi-player online games like World of Warcraft, and the avatar-driven Second Life which the program shows is now used by corporations and colleges alike.

Most striking to me was a comment by a researcher at Stanford University who directs the lab studying the impact of virtual immersions via online personas or avatars on people's perceptions of reality: "Digital stuff is such a new phenomenon that if it looks real and feels real, the brain tells us it is real," says Dr. Bailenson. "We've done studies with children where they see themselves swimming around with whales in virtual reality. ... About 50 percent of them will believe that in physical space, they actually went to SeaWorld and swam with whales."  Is this a tipping point where perception begins to trump reality?

The show also served to remind me of other current studies researching technology's impact on learning and writing.  Some of these show that shifting gears constantly causes the brain to lose time on task and forces it to refocus, which actually interferes with both learning and writing.

With newer iterations of technology coming to the fore at breakneck speed and picking up larger pools of younger users, scholars are now specifically probing the impact of social media experiences like gaming and Facebook on writing.

Composition scholar and teacher Andrea Lunsford conducted a webinar late last semester through which she shared her most recent research on student writing at Stanford where she has led a large study of 14,000 writing samples over the past decade. She eloquently noted that student texts still exhibit the kinds of issues and concerns they did before the advent of iPods and iPads.

She was also quick to point out that her research has shown a marked jump in frequency of student writing---mainly outside of school.  Unquestionably, such social writing makes different demands of writers, but her research finds an overall adeptness of student writers at shifting between these different writing situations.

Lunsford suggests that in a world of new and emerging literacies, the role and responsibility of college teachers is to determine which features of the old literacies must be maintained in order to produce sustained and coherent writing.

And this is part of what makes the assignment issued by Cindy Herbert even more salient. It emanates from her desire to have students grapple with the implications of technology beyond its basic applications which are the focus of this introductory course. 

As a teacher long committed to WAC, she wants them to do the analytic and reflective writing that makes that level of critical thinking possible.  By configuring it as a blog exercise and by coaching students on how to construct appropriate messages for this purpose, she guides students to the expectations of writing in social contexts within and beyond her class.

Have you seen much evidence of texting behaviors in your students' work? How have you responded?

Inside the Teachers Studio: Brave New World Ethnography Project

One of the best assets of a college with a culture of writing? Instructors in all disciplines are encouraged to spend time creating unique and productive learning experiences for their students.  

The sharing of such assignments has been a staple of Longview's WAC Workshops.  Seeing what other instructors have designed always serves to point up the incredible diversity of writing projects that can be offered and also illustrates the rich array of learning experiences Longview provides for students.

This semester the blog will feature some of these innovative assignments, large and small, which invite students to develop as thinkers and writers through a thoughtfully designed learning experience.

MELISSA EATON, Anthropology

Melissa contributes here a dynamic and provocative assignment based on Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.  Melissa used the novel as one of the texts in her Cultural Anthropology course in Fall of 2010.  

Read her guest blog post below to learn about her design decisions and how this comprehensive project came to life within her course.  Then look at the assignment itself in the Innovative Assignments section. 

Good news: You will be able to view student projects in response to this assignment at Imagination Longview on May 4!  Learn more about Melissa by reading her WAC Profile.

An introduction to the Brave New World (BNW) Ethnography Project

THE IDEA

I first daydreamed about this assignment during the summer of 2010 as I was reading Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World for the first time and contemplating the possibilities of using it in my courses.

Cultural anthropology instructors have long lamented the lack of an introduction to doing ethnography in most introductory level courses, especially since it is recommended that budding anthropologists should first study a culture outside of their own. Huxley’s dystopia seemed the perfect opportunity to practice ethnographic observations and interpreting cultures without having to worry about travel budgets, grant writing, informed consent, and a human subjects review board.

THE DESIGN

Designing the BNW project took some time as I grappled with the complexity of the project. I wanted students to develop skills of observation, cultural relativity, reflexivity, ethnographic note taking, ethnographic writing, peer review, and the outside application of anthropological knowledge. 

Finding ways to split up these tasks into manageable units, learning how to manage (and teach) a wiki to house the information, and writing thorough instructions to communicate what I wanted for the students proved to be the most daunting tasks. Writing the instruction sheets took the most time since I was designing every element of this assignment from scratch. I included several examples in order to make it clear what I wanted students to produce, including several note-taking methods used in anthropology and two examples of ethnographic description by Horace Miner and Clifford Geertz that are classics in cultural anthropology.

I realized quickly that in order to ensure students participated fully, I needed to make the assignment worth a significant portion of the class, which ended up being 25% of the overall course grade. The BNW project also replaced three papers that I usually assign for this particular course.

Of course, I quickly determined that I wanted to give students an opportunity to practice these skills and improve their performance. So, I designed the project to be accomplished twice. The student’s first effort would take place during the first half of the book (before the characters go to the Savage Reservation) and a second effort would observe more complex interactions of culture shock in the second half of the book. 

STUDENT RESPONSE

Overall, students responded well to this assignment. We spent a large amount of time during class discussing the instructions and the examples. However, there was a large learning curve for some. As expected, dealing with ethnocentrism was a major challenge for some students. For others, the barrier was the fact that this was a complex assignment with many parts. I made sure to break the assignment into steps and designed a checklist for students to review to ensure that all steps were completed.

Some students battled with the technology of uploading their documentation to the class wiki. For some students, I provided additional help and even uploaded (or created links) to make sure that the information was available for their peer reviewer. 

For many, however, the largest impediment was creativity. In order to facilitate the necessary skill of reflexivity, I asked students to create an anthropologist’s persona who was following the characters in the book around. The purpose of this part of the exercise is for students to really think about the biases and the impact that their persona is making on the process of note taking and in the interpretation of the BNW culture. 

Additionally, as the last step in the BNW project, I wanted each student to take the ethnographic knowledge produced by another student and apply it in a creative format (like a poster, a synopsis for a film, or a commercial or a product). Both of these elements caused the most pressure and anxiety for the students, perhaps because of the creativity required of the assignment or the lack of familiarity with assignments that permit creativity. After making it through the process of the first BNW ethnography, the students who were anxious the first time seemed much more comfortable the second time around.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, I was pleased with the products generated by the students for this BNW ethnography. One of the strengths of the assignment design is that students had to read the text in a new way, and that standard reviews and summaries of Huxley’s classic would be useless in completing the assignment. 

As a result, many students became very involved in the project and some thoroughly enjoyed the creativity allowed in its execution. In fact, I recommended two students’ work to be included into the Imagination Longview showcase of student work this spring. 

Although some students chose not to complete the assignment, as happens in every course, I certainly feel that the it not only accomplished the course objectives, but also taught the students valuable skills that can be used in the observation of daily life. I am not certain if I would ever have the opportunity to use this assignment in my cultural anthropology class in the future, I hope that I could modify it for other common reading project novels used at Longview.

 ---Melissa

Keeping Up While Winding Down

image by Idea go

As another semester comes to a close, instructors necessarily turn much of their attention to evaluating and grading student work. Preliminary drafts of projects have been completed and revised by students---or not, the coaching offered and counsel issued by instructors has been heeded---or not, and the final versions of projects students turn in to instructors as evidence of their best work may successfully reflect just that—or not.

At this point, it’s possible for teachers to feel relieved, tired, frustrated, exhilarated, exhausted, ecstatic, or disappointed. In fact, it’s entirely possible for them to cycle through all of these emotions in the space of a single afternoon, especially if the afternoon was spent grading.

To combat grading fatigue, consider these tips:

• Pace yourself so you are not overwhelmed by an entire set of papers or exams at one sitting.  Get up and move around or take a walk after a set number of papers, especially if you realize that you are struggling to focus.  For those who can tolerate it, caffeine may offer some modest health benefits in addition to stimulating your brain temporarily and helping you maintain focus (The Mayo Clinic). 
• Harder to do at this late date, but schedule more time than you think you need for your grading sessions.
• Remember that the grade you assign to a final project is an evaluation of a single performance.  You needn't assume a defensive posture as you respond, just provide the necessary assessment and offer brief remarks that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the project.
• Though you won't be seeing another draft of this piece, it is still legitimate to pose questions to the student. Students can always benefit from your specific questions about their intended meaning or writing choices.
• Recall that less is more; studies have shown that a few salient comments (or questions) have greater impact on future student performance than a page of detailed instructor comments.
• Devise and use a scoring guide of some kind (holistic or primary trait) to help communicate your evaluation clearly and efficiently.
• Conduct research: note and record consistent patterns of problems that students exhibit as a group.  It might be harder to remember these when you want to revise your instructions next semester or next fall if you don't jot them down now. 
• Talk to colleagues; share your utter joy and bitter disappointment as they happen.
• Call me if you need assistance with any of these tips!

Connections Unbound

Connecting people to ideas related to writing and through writing have been critical dimensions of the WAC Program from the start.  In fact, one of the first across-the-curriculum events sponsored by WAC and some other new initiatives in the late 1980s was a large-scale reading of Kurt Vonnegut's futuristic novel, Galapagos.

Common reading projects are a great way to engage students in a larger consideration of ideas than a single classroom experience can typically provide and, of course, are a great way to integrate relevant writing opportunities into courses to any degree an instructor desires. 

Faculty who've participated in recent common reading projects at Longview, such as The Plague and Affluenza, can attest to the value of having students read a book and connect it to what they are studying.  Many are already planning to incorporate Huxley's Brave New World into their courses next semester.

With Here Comes Everybody, we took a slightly different approach by informally inviting everybody at LV to check out some of Shirky's ideas and just play with them. Reactions to the book have been varied: some are struck by Shirky's analysis of social patterns, some feel they already had a grasp of the ideas he explores, others regard his ideas as ground-breaking and transformative, and a few don't agree fully with the way Shirky accounts for some of the social changes we've seen in the last two decades.

What matters is that people were considering these ideas about social media, social networks, and human behavior, probing the relationships between them, talking about them with others, and trying to put them into a broader phenomenological context.  Getting these important perspectives into circulation was really the point since not everyone's schedule could accommodate participation in the meet-ups.

Something else interesting happened with the read-along: Honors students discovered it and joined in the discussions.  As it turns out, the major theme for Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) this year is the "Democratization of Information," coincidentally a rather perfect fit with the book we chose to feature in this new way of engaging our Longview community.  (Although after reading Shirky's take on the six degrees of separation and social networking, I'm reluctantly beginning to doubt the existence of coincidence since he makes such a good case for how principles of probability rule.  And can I just say I think the notion of coincidence, while considerably less scientific, is way more fun?)

Keet Kopecky, LV Honors Program director and LV WAC Cadre member, explains how PTK and the Honors Program are connected: "MCC-Longview's Honors Program and the national honor society Phi Theta Kappa both require students to achieve and maintain a 3.5 GPA in order to join. Participants in both programs benefit from enhanced engagement in the classroom and through campus and community involvement."

Keet added that generous scholarships are available for active members of the Honors Program during their time at MCC-Longview and that there are significant scholarship opportunities for active members of PTK upon graduation and transfer to a 4-year university. Keet says that there is a large overlap between the membership of the Honors Program and PTK at Longview, so many of his honors seminar students are also members of PTK.

Keet is facilitating two honors seminar this semester, both entitled "Democratization of Information," since that is the 2010-2011 national PTK theme.  Keet said, "I always involve the students in designing my seminars, and when I mentioned Shirky's book, they enthusiastically embraced discussing it as part of the seminars."

He notes that students brought "generational and life-experience perspectives different from those of most Longview employees, making our monthly book meet-ups involving honors students, faculty, and staff quite rich and insightful."

At last week's seminars, Keet said his students "offered unsolicited comments in strong support of the faculty/staff/student book discussions and hoped that the college understood how much they liked the engagement with employees and hoped it would be repeated in the future."

I certainly can't speak for everyone at LV, but the WAC Program is definitely up for another read-along after our last meet-up for Here Comes Everybody this Friday, Nov. 12, at 2:00, at Next Door Pizza.  As always, you are more than welcome to join us!

In Their Own Words

Clips of Selected Interviews from WAC Digital Archives

(video compiled by Clay Bussey)

From its inception, the WAC Program at MCC-Longview was carefully researched and thoughtfully designed, which has unquestionably contributed to its longevity.  But the only way a program like this can thrive for 25 years is because people have taken its ideas to heart in their teaching and support of learning. 

WAC comes to life in classroom after classroom, semester after semester, year after year, because people like those featured in this selection of clips from interviews (conducted five years ago on our 20th anniversary) strongly believe writing is a unique and powerful mode of learning.  You see much evidence of it in the way they teach their courses.  But don't take my word for it; click on the video link and hear what those involved in WAC have to say. 

Why WI?

Over the past 12 years that Writing Intensive (WI) courses have been offered at MCC-Longview, people have occasionally wondered why we named it Writing Intensive.  Isn't the term "intensive" somewhat daunting and doesn't it suggest that students will do more work than they would otherwise?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answers are "no" and "no."  The running joke in the WAC Program is that we could have named the experience "Writing Euphoria" and students would still shy away because the word striking fear in their hearts is actually "writing" rather than "intensive."

We know this because during the earliest years of General Education writing assessment, we discovered that students were waiting until their last semester at MCC-Longview to take a composition course.  We also found that the more composition courses students had taken, the better they performed on the writing assessment.  Needless to say, this finding speaks well of the composition experiences orchestrated by English faculty. 

However, we all agreed that the kind of knowledge and writing experience recieved through composition courses would serve students much better if the courses were taken sooner rather than later. So the Writing Intensive requirement works, in part, as a powerful lever, steering students into the prerequisite, English 101, much earlier in their academic careers than they would elect to take it if left to their own devices.

What happens next is that faculty in other disciplines can build on that English 101 knowledge and experience by their embrace of the writing process and carefully designed assignments marked by thoughtful use of drafts and feedback meant to develop further the critical thinking abilities of their students.

The irony is that a Writing Intensive course is not more work for the students who take it, but, rather, for the faculty member who teaches it.  For students, such courses offer interesting and unique writing projects just as many MCC-Longview courses do. 

In Jim Pratt's Intro to Microcomputer Applications, for instance, students create a business plan for a hypothetical business they invent.  In the Math-English learning community, Bridget Gold and Becky Foster have students do an array of writing projects, including letters explaining math concepts, similar to the kind featured in the book they read, Letters to a Young Mathmetician. 

Matthew Westra encourages his Adolescent Psychology students to develop their own assignment by investigating an aspect of the field which particularly interests them. Those going into teaching can devise a curriculum pertinent to adolescent development while others choose to examine the historical, social, or medical dimensions of this stage.

Anne Nienhueser's WI project in her online course invites students to design a green home by researching ecological and economical sources and applying the concepts they've learned in Foundations of Physics.

For instructors, these courses reflect an emphasis on revision and an obligation to provide considered feedback to each student on a project draft so that the student can re-think some of the writing choices he or she has made.  Students then have the opportunity to fully consider the impact and effectiveness of their writing and make changes to strengthen the project by revising it before turning it in for final evaluation by the instructor.

Once students take a WI course, they typically are quite sold on its value.  In fact, it is not at all unusual for students who have transferred to 4-year colleges to report back on how valuable these WI courses were in preparing them for their coursework at the next level and even for employment beyond that. 

The LV WAC Cadre ultimately settled on the name "Writing Intensive" because they knew that most of the 4-year schools to which our students transfer use this identifier. For better or worse, it seemed logical and appropriate to call the experience by its most recognizable name.

Check out MCC-Longview's Spring 2012 WI offerings and please direct your students to them!  The instructors you'll find listed there are quite willing to discuss the nature of the projects and course work with interested students.